If, for some unknown reason you really want to figure out where
I'm coming from, here is a, for the most part, a completely boring Bio . Sys Adminning

I'm a sys-admin by trade, the kind that sort of gets caught up in his users'
problems and makes them his own. Sys-Admining is a phenomanlly boring job to
describe, but actually an incredible learning experience. Oddly, most of the
things you learn have little or nothing to do with what your primary mission is
(That is, keeping systems running), because after all, you hopefully know a good
chunk of that already!

Most of the Intel you pick up has to do with what it takes to run a company. I can honestly say that I had never hear the word "Channel" in relationship to sales before sys-adminning at Netscape. But, in a sort of osmotic process, while keeping the ever so reliable Windows-95 systems up and running in the corporate area, One manages to pick up an astonishing amount of information about the various ways you can get other people to sell your product for you.

And not just sales - Marketing, Finance, Legal, HR, Product Development, Business Development - Even the exec staff - each of them have a particular ebb and flow of processes and interactions.

I'm a Sys-Admin at a start-up now, having decided that working for a technology/operations company is really where the most fun is. Working at a Startup has another advantage, and that is you get to do, or be exposed to, everything in the IS environment.

And that's a big difference from working in a big company - there, you have tons of resources, and lots of focus, but anything outside your sphere of control typically remains a mystery to you. At a startup, It's all on your plate.

The Tricky part of all this is learning and retaining everything. Not only do you have to maintain a semblance of a life, and try keep partially up to date with the world around you (Which usually can be boiled down to who is bombing who, and which of the characters from Star Trek, the original series, are still alive - and maybe catching the odd movie or two-hundred a year) but also learning these other things. Things that don't even have to do with that tech knowledge you're supposed to be so profoundly skilled in.

Like the Market - As a denzien of Silicon Valley, it is my God Given responsibility to understand the Stock Market. Options (And not just calls or puts, but covered calls, and Black/Scholes analysis of said options) Bond/Fixed equity impact on indices, ticker symbols/ histories/market cap/earnings of the major tech companies, and so on. Not only do you have to be able to defend , you have to be able to respond with an equally compelling perspective consisting of a Graham and Dodds like fundamental valuation.

Meanwhile you are kicking yourself because you haven't spent enough time learning Perl - I mean, anybody more advanced than a five year old child in this valley is a competent Perl coder, and can utilize the best of the CPAN offering to do pretty much anything they want with a text stream (And, because HTTP bears a remarkable resemblance to a text stream, anything they want with the Web)

And you don't instantly understand everything in that sendmail.cf file. And you haven't picked up any Cisco Certifcations lately. Or even (blech) dumbed-down Micrsoft certifications.

And lets not start talking about how little effort you've put into your web site...